Armour

Serve in a

Garnish:

Orange zest twist

How to make:

THROW (or stir) all ingredients with ice and strain into chilled glass.

Allergens:

Recipe contains the following allergens:

• Lustau Jarana Fino Sherry – Sulphur Dioxide/Sulphites
• Strucchi Rosso Vermouth – Sulphur Dioxide/Sulphites

AKA:

Duke of Marlborough Cocktail

Review:

A Bamboo but with rosso (sweet) vermouth in place of dry vermouth to produce a cocktail that's perhaps more digestivo than aperitivo.

Variant:

Bamboo; Adonis

History:

The Armour first emerges in the anonymously written 1898 book Cocktails... How to make them with an equal parts sherry to Italian vermouth with orange bitters recipe.

Armour Cocktail.
FINE ice in a mixing-glass, three dashes orange bitters, half a jigger sherry, half a jigger Italian vermouth. Mix, strain into cocktail-glass. Add a piece of orange peel.

Cocktails... How to make them, 1898

In his 1900 Modern American Drinks, George J. Kappeler repeats this equal parts recipe with dashes of orange bitters, as do other cocktail book published through to 1930 when Charlie Roe & Jim Schwenck's The Home-Bartender's Guide and Song Book reaffirms this recipe and also hints to the origin of this cocktail's name, "the stockyards out in Chigago."

ARMOUR COCKTAIL.
You need armor to withstand this one. Back of the stockyards out in Chicago, they used to drink one of these before breakfast, and go out and look for a policeman to beat up.
P. S. – They still do it.

Fine ice in mixing glass
Three dashes of orange bitters
Half a jigger of sherry
Half a jigger of Italian Vermouth
Mix, strain into cocktail glass
Add a piece of orange peel

Charlie Roe & Jim Schwenck, The Home-Bartender's Guide and Song Book, 1930

The following year, this cocktail's Chicago roots are cemented in Albert Stevens Crockett's Old Waldorf Bar Days, particularly the "Concerning the Curriculum" section covering the naming of cocktails appearing on the succeeding pages marked with an asterisk. The salient sentence is found on page 102, "For example, take the Armour; called after a well-known Chicago patron of the establishment."

ARMOUR*
Two dashes Orange Bitters
One-half jigger Sherry
One-half jigger Italian Vermuth
Stir; strain

Albert-Stevens-Crockett, Old Waldorf Bar Days, 1931

"Stockyards out in Chicago" refers to Chicago's Union Stock Yards, by far the most important for meat processing in America and the site of one of the world's largest slaughterhouses.

Albert Stevens-Crockett tells us that the cocktail was named after a "well-known Chicago patron of the Waldorf-Astoria and this is likely to have been Jonathan Ogden Armour (1863-1927), American meatpacking magnate and president of Armour & Company, the largest meat processor in the US.

Nutrition:

One serving of Armour contains 102 calories.

Alcohol content:

• 0.8 standard drinks
• 12.27% alc./vol. (24.54° proof)
• 11.1 grams of pure alcohol